The After
by mcmachine
Summary: Jackson and April have both returned to work after the shooting that took the lives of their best friends. However, both are surprised for the unwelcomed reminder Dr. Webber has for them.


_There are wounds that never show on the body that are deeper and more hurtful than anything that bleeds._

Too many late nights had been spent staring at similar quotes and possible coping mechanisms on Google. It seemed like it was a better use of time than just laying in bed and staring at the ceiling, still able to see Gary Clark's face far too clearly. I could hear Jackson waking himself up from a nightmare in the room over – the shouts and the sudden stops give it away. I wondered if anyone else in the house knew. Alex and Derek were both in the hospital more often than not, which meant that Meredith, Lexie, and Cristina were usually there too. Somehow the house had been left to the two of us most of the time. The two people who happened to belong in it the least.

Mandatory counseling had been instated for all of us. That was to be expected after a tragic trauma. The hospital didn't want to be responsible for any more accidents happening and this covered all their bases. I wanted to think that it was because they cared, but sometimes, it was hard to tell. I felt like I was stuck in the back of the classroom, forgotten.

My best friend was dead. I could see still see the crimson stains of her blood on my hands, feel the weight of blood on my scrubs sticking to my skin. She was so tiny and yet there had still been so much blood, a pool of it too large for what seemed to make logical sense. She'd always been pale and yet it had never been quite so bad with the bullet hole in her forehead and her eyes staring lifelessly back at me. My best friend was dead, and it seemed like I was the only one who missed her. Who remembered her.

The locker room at work felt lonely between just me and Jackson. After I've donned on a fresh pair of light blue scrubs for the day, I sat down on the wooden bench in the middle of the room, letting out a loud sigh. I don't feel bad about it with no one else around to hear.

"You alright?" He asked, glancing over at me.

"Yeah." The lie flowed out of my lips naturally. I don't want to burden him with my thoughts.

Jackson sat down on the bench next to me. "I thought only the first day being back would be weird. But it's still weird," he admitted, rubbing the top of his thighs restlessly.

"I don't think I've ever come to work and not felt a little nervous," I murmured. "But at least now, I have a real reason. Or at least one outside of everyone hates me."

"Reed never hated you." His heavy words, though honest, fall awkwardly.

"Yeah."

Silence fell between us for a few moments and I couldn't bring myself to break it. Reed wasn't here. Reed had teased me like the rest of them here and there, but we were roommates and the closest person that each other had in Seattle. Now that lease was gone – it had been under her name, after all, and I was crammed into Meredith's house with the rest of them.

The door of the locker room swung open and we both reflexively looked up at the same time. Dr. Webber was standing at the door, apparently expecting to see more than just the two of us. I pushed a weak smile on my lips.

"Avery, Kepner, I thought you might be here." He spoke.

"Did you need something, Chief?" No longer a title that Shepherd would hold, especially not while he was healing from the bullet in his heart. A bullet that had been there because of me.

"Yes." His voice was gruff. "With Reed and Charles… both of you are going to need to modify and fill out your emergency contact paperwork again since they are no longer with us." The way that he said it, it almost sounded like he just meant that they had left of their own free will. Not that they had been murdered senselessly.

Neither one of us knew what to say, reverting back to silence.

"I'll uh, have someone come to you with the paperwork." He mumbled, shuffling back a few steps and letting the door slam shut behind him.

Both of us stayed still after the door had fallen shut to process the information. Reed had been my emergency contact and I had been hers for about the last year. I knew that Percy and Jackson had always been extremely close, and with Jackson's mother living in Boston, it didn't surprise me that he had picked someone local in case the worse happened and they needed an immediate decision. It put us in the same predicament.

A tear lands on top of my thigh before I realized that some had even begun falling in the first place. Sniffling quickly, I tried to blink them back before any more could follow. I didn't need to cry at work and make a further embarrassment out of myself. I couldn't. Yet the wave of horror rushed over me as I can see her still body laying on the linoleum floor again in a pool of her own blood, pale as could be. She'd been cold already. She had died there alone. Instantly, at least, a bullet like that there would have been no pain or suffering. I didn't know how long she had laid there before I had found her like that, how long she would have been there if I hadn't found her.

Sobs fall past my lips and I bent forward at the waist, both my hands covering my face as if I could hide away from Jackson. It's noisy and messy, snotty and gross. The bench creaked underneath us as his weight shifted on top of it.

"Hey…" His voice was hesitant and his hand rested on my upper back, rubbing it gently.

"No." I shook my head against my hands.

"It's okay." The palm of his hand rubbed circles now. "It sucks. I… I'd forgotten that I had him down as my emergency contact. Definitely didn't expect they would do something like that so soon."

My knuckles wiped underneath my eyes. "They're upping security too," I sniffled. "It's like they expect something bad is about to happen again."

How could they? The funerals had barely happened and there had been too many to go to – Reed, Percy, Nurse Vivian. Alex and Derek were lucky that they hadn't been added to the list. I had been, too. I had pulled a bullet out of Owen's shoulder, but it hadn't been bad. He hadn't been near death.

Not everyone had gone to all of the funerals. Jackson and I had attended all three. After going to Reed and Percy's services, it felt wrong not to go to Vivian's funeral too. I didn't know her as well, but hers had been more crowded than Reed and Percy's. More people knew her. She had been at Grey Sloan for years and the four of us, we hadn't been there that long. Just since the merger. We were more expendable than the rest, it seemed like.

I still wondered if Meredith wished that I had been the one shot in the chest and not Derek. If I had, would Jackson and Cristina have worked so hard to save my life? Or would I have been another funeral to go to?

"Nothing bad is going to happen again," Jackson attempted to reassure me.

"How do you know that? Why are they acting like it is?" I straightened up suddenly, his hand falling off my back. A little mascara smeared across the back of my knuckles as I rubbed underneath my eyes again.

"They're just being cautious," he murmured. "Making sure that there's nothing that they can be liable for in the future. It's just insurance, nothing more to it. Trust me, this is the kind of thing that would have my mom gotten all over if it was her hospital. It's purely administrative politics, nothing more than that."

"I hate it," I muttered with a shake of my head, palms slapping back down against my thighs as they fell.

"Me too," he admitted. "It sucks."

Unable to find more words to say, I tilted to the right and leaned against Jackson. His arm wrapped around my shoulders and brought me in, offering a little more comfort. He's stiff and it's still a bit awkward, but it was better than sitting there and feeling more alone than I ever had in my life. No family, no best friend… Jackson, somehow, was the only person that I had left in Seattle. That was scary.

I'd read some recent article on Scientific American that the stress of disaster brought people together. I wasn't sure if I believed it. The fact that I was alone now seemed to be painfully obvious. Meredith, Cristina, and Alex all seemed to remain bonded. Maybe I was only meant to grow closer with Jackson.

"I don't know who else I'm going to put down," I confessed, wetting my lips. "Both my parents are so far away and I wouldn't want them to ever have to make that kind of decision for me. Same with my sisters…" None of them were educated in the same way that I was and it was difficult to imagine any of them being able to make the best possible decision on my behalf, to balance what we believed religiously with what I knew to be true scientifically. "I don't have anyone."

"Put me down."

The ends of my hair practically hit his face as I whipped around my head to look directly at him, brows drawing down toward my forehead as I looked at him. I blinked in surprise, trying to wrap my head around what he had said despite how simple his words were on a surface level.

"What?" I questioned, wetting my lips. "Put you down?"

"Yeah," Jackson nodded his head. "Put me down. And I'll put you down. We both lost our emergency contact, so… let's put each other down now."

Teeth dug into my lower lip harshly as I looked at him, hurting just a little bit but I ignored it. Why would he want me to put him down? And why would he want to put him down? I knew that we were friends at a distance, at least, closer to each other than we were anyone else at this hospital.

"You don't have to do that just because you feel bad for me," I said with a shake of my head.

"That's not why." His brows knitted together. "We both need someone and… I mean, right now, you're all I've got and I figure that I'm probably all that you've got right now too. It's a two-way street."

"Yeah?" I let go of the breath that I was holding onto. "Because I mean it. You don't have to do it just because you feel bad for me or you think that I'm some kind of… lonely, soon to be a crazy cat lady. Because I'm not." Or I was and just didn't want to admit it yet.

"It's not that, I promise," Jackson insisted. "I need someone just as much as you do."

This close to him, it was almost awkward to lock into eye contact with him. I'd never noticed how many freckles he had across the bridge of his nose and sprinkled underneath his blue eyes, but there seemed to be an entire galaxy of them suddenly there. My cheeks warmed suddenly and I looked away from him, lips pressing together in a tight line. I wasn't sure what all to say but it seemed like the only reasonable answer here had become clear.

"Okay." I gave a small nod of my head, eyes trained on the tiles beneath our feet. "Okay. I'll put you down."

"Good," he breathed out and his hand moved back to just beneath the back of my collarbones, rubbing against my scrub top gently. "We'll both put each other down. Problem solved."

"If only it was that simple."

There was no solving the problem that we had both lost our best friends here in Seattle and now we were going to have to find our place in the hospital all over again. There would be no choice but to get back into being friends with Meredith, Cristina, and Alex. Izzie was gone now and she had seemed like the nicest of the group, so that was one more obstacle being thrown in the way. Even if this was one problem checked off of the list, there were still other ones that we were going to have to worry about. I wasn't sure how either one of us would approach it but Jackson would probably be fine. Unlike me, he had a natural charisma that just made people like him. I had fallen for it.

"I know." Jackson's expression was genuine as he looked at me, an unexpected softness found in his blue-green eyes. "But you know, checking off the first box is supposed to be the hardest, or whatever. We'll figure out the rest."

"Yeah," I breathed out as I found myself smiling back at him. "Yeah, we will."

"Any special requests?" A smile cracked across his face as he looked at me – one that I could actually find myself believing. It makes it easier to keep up the smile on my own cheeks. "Donate your body to some special museum of science so they have a record of weird redheads?" He teased.

"No." Laughter slipped through my lips with a shake of my head. "No, please, no. If science says I'm not going to make it, then pull the plug and let me go be with Jesus. Donate all of my viable organs. To organ donors, not to weird museums."

"Yeah, we're on the same page about that. Well, minus the Jesus part." He ran his hand over his shaved head. "If science says I'm not going to make it, then peace out."

The words made me snort and roll my eyes, a hand coming up to cover my mouth immediately after the noise had escaped. God, snorting was the last thing that I needed to do around here. Jackson might let go of the teasing but there was no way that Alex would have if he had heard it – thank God he wasn't around right now. I could only imagine the way that he and Cristina would have teased us relentlessly about the conversation that we had just had.

"Peace out, okay," I chuckled. "I'll keep those exact words in mind."

His arm wrapped around my shoulders again and he gave me a squeeze. I returned the side hug firmly and allowed myself to momentarily lose some of the tension that I was holding in my shoulders. It felt good to have someone just for a moment.

"Thanks," I murmured.

"You don't need to thank me for anything," Jackson shook his head. As I said, I need you to."


End file.
